Gay Phoenix Read online

  2

  Sir John Appleby glanced in the direction of the South Pole. It was really, he supposed, like that. Far below this terrace on which he sat, the city of Adelaide sparkled like a profusion of gems poured out at random from the black velvet jewelcase of the night. Une parure de diamants, as a dealer in such things might say. The spectacle was not quite so dramatic as Rio de Janiero viewed from a similar elevation, but it was roughly in the same class. There were the same constellations overhead – the Southern Cross, and Orion upside-down – and the same atmospheric clarity produced the same effect of the stars above and the street lights below as positively shouting at each other.

  But let your gaze pass between the two – and what was there then beyond the invisible horizon? A little to the left lay the Coorong, a two-hundred-mile strip of something or other making no great impression on a map. A little to the right was Kangaroo Island – no more than six or seven times the size of the Isle of Wight, and so even less conspicuous in terms of the scale upon which nature built in this hemisphere. Between the two stretched Encounter Bay. (The explorers of Australia, Appleby reflected, had possessed a flair for naming both places and creatures which Adam in his Garden might have envied: cheek by jowl here were Cape Catastrophe, Mount Remarkable and Dismal Swamp.) In Encounter Bay you would be unlikely to encounter much. And beyond it – an empty four thousand miles off – hovered the chilly goal attained by Roald Amundsen on December 14, 1911.

  Rather vaguely – for the dinner just concluded had been an excellent one – Appleby endeavoured to visualize the South Pole. As a small boy he had naturally thought of it as something actually sticking up out of the snow – rather in the manner of the candle from the icing of his baby sister’s first birthday cake. He knew it couldn’t have been placed by men, since it had already been in position when the first men arrived. Was it perhaps something that God had failed to tidy up after finishing the Creation? Or had it – at least at the start of things – had a functional significance? That was probably it. God, having fashioned the earth, had taken its North Pole between his finger and thumb and set his vast new top spinning upon a South Pole mysteriously poised in space. It had been a humming top. That was why there was something called the music of the spheres.

  Accepting brandy from his host (not Australian brandy, although the wine had been wholly admirable Australian wine), Appleby progressed to less childish, yet still relaxed, musings on his present situation. The astronomical infinitudes the silence of which scared Pascal may be appreciated by anybody who steps into his Kentish or Berkshire garden on a starry night. But the answering vastness, by any human measure, of man’s own speck of dust within them has to be traversed to be realized. Even then, modern modes of locomotion can delude you. When Appleby had last flown from London to Naples he had almost missed the Alps through secluding himself for a couple of minutes in the plane’s loo – whereas Hannibal must have been constrained to acknowledge such natural calls scores or hundreds of times as he scrambled across them with his elephants. Years ago, Appleby had made the trip from Cape Town to Fremantle on a freighter; and that had been quite something. On the present occasion (having succumbed to the persuasion that sea voyages are restful) he had crossed the Pacific on quite a fast liner; and that had been the real revelation. There were people who said it could be done, and had been done, in rafts or in dugout canoes. There were people who – apparently quite unconcernedly – made such passages as a one-man show. Appleby reflected soberly on the existence of such supermen. He had never, so far as he could remember, encountered one of them. They set sail from Vancouver, from Lima, from Valparaiso, and eventually turned up in Sydney Harbour (which was quite worth turning up in). They were then accorded civic receptions, and received telegrams of congratulation from the Queen. And quite right, too.

  ‘My dear Sir John, I hope it isn’t too chilly for you out here?’ The eminent physician whose invitation Appleby had accepted set down the brandy and reached for a box of cigars. His name was Budgery, and it appeared that he was the university’s professor of clinical medicine. He wasn’t what one might crudely think of as a colonial type; he had all the polish you pay extra for in Harley Street or Wimpole Street. ‘How fortunate,’ he was now murmuring, ‘that the excellent Mr Castro still consents to export these trifling luxuries. They are no less lethal than the Jamaican sort – but preferable, if one happens to have the habit of them, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby took a cigar. ‘And I don’t feel at all chilly. Although no longer, on the other hand, decidedly the reverse.’

  ‘It has certainly been one of our warmer days. But the cool change has turned up. You will sleep soundly, I’m glad to say, even down in that hotel.’

  ‘They have air conditioning, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Budgery clearly thought poorly of air-conditioned hotels. ‘But the old-fashioned among us still have faith in living up here, you know. And in digging our houses well into the side of a hill. This one – my great-grandfather built it – has a whole storey pretty well underground. We can dwell as troglodytes all summer long, if we have a mind to.’

  ‘A most judicious disposition of things.’ Appleby looked down at the city. It was an early March night, and all through the day the plain had swum in staggering heat. Even up here in the Mount Lofty range it couldn’t have been exactly temperate. ‘The hall porter told me there was coming up a change.’

  ‘His precise expression, that.’ Budgery laughed comfortably. ‘You have an ear for idiom, Sir John.’

  ‘Just where does the change come up from?’

  ‘From Antarctica, one must say.’ Budgery’s gaze went in the direction to which Appleby’s own had lately travelled. ‘You are looking down on what – on the dry-bulb thermometer – is about the hottest capital city in the world. But Mount Lofty looks to Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, and in that direction our nearest neighbours are the penguins.’ Budgery appeared to take pride in these geographical and zoological circumstances. ‘The region gives a puff from time to time, and Adelaide’s temperature drops dramatically.’ Budgery’s hand went to a pocket. ‘Matches, Appleby?’ he asked politely, and passed on to other guests.

  Two or three ‘Sir Johns’ and then ‘Appleby’. English, not American, conventions. It seemed a rather homeward-looking part of what had been the Empire long ago. Appleby sat back and lit his cigar. Even the dinner jacket he’d been given a hint to don. But then there had been a hint, too, of something mildly formal about this all-male dinner at Budgery’s house. Presumably Budgery was a bachelor. ‘A few of us who dine together from time to time,’ the professor of medicine had said. It was some sort of dining club, in fact – and when playing host one could ask a guest of one’s own from outside. Appleby, doubtless naively, was impressed by meeting ordinances so familiar so far away.

  Appleby conversed with Mr Justice Somebody. You couldn’t have anything more English-sounding than that. The judge knew about Appleby, and expressed civil interest in the lectures he had been giving to certain higher echelons of the Australian police. But he was also taking pleasure in revealing his own extensive acquaintance with members of the English bench and bar. He told a story about the Lord Chancellor, and drove the point home with another about the Lord Chief Justice. Appleby, himself acquainted with these legal luminaries, listened respectfully, but didn’t pretend to be awed. From Adelaide you could now fly to London and back for a short weekend – to shoot a few pheasants, say, or attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. But the brute distance remained. So there lingered this business of Home Thoughts from Abroad, and of people not knowing how lucky they were in what they still lurkingly thought of as their outposts, even their banishment. There must have been plenty of times when Roman Bath was a lot more salubrious than the city of the seven hills itself. But that wouldn’t have prevented prosperous Romano-British gentry – taking the waters, pottering in the baths, enjoying the
excellent provincial restaurants of Aquae Sulis – from nostalgic chat about their connections with Top People in the palaces of Rome the Great. Distance lent enchantment to the view. Appleby found himself wondering what else it did. Take crime, for instance – something which the mind of a retired policeman like himself might naturally turn to. Had what might be called authentically English crime a prestige value among Australian crooks? Could an English criminal, drifting out here, exploit in this local upper class its almost unconscious assumption that it was more intimately acquainted with things English than was in fact the case? But this was an obscure speculation. It faded from Appleby’s mind as inconsequently as it had entered it.

  There were six men all told – sprawled or sitting in wicker chairs in a shallow arc beneath a broad verandah. The cigar smoke, bluish in a low light from two subdued lamps, blended oddly and pleasantly with the pervasive smell of the eucalypts. A couple of these nearby showed ragged silhouettes against the luminous heaven. Appleby wondered about the phrase ‘up a gum tree’. If you were up one, it didn’t look as if it would be easy to get down again. But probably the expression wasn’t of Australian origin. He was thinking of enquiring about this when he became aware that conversation was fading out among his five companions. It hadn’t come abruptly to a halt; people were simply permitting themselves pauses – and glances – which somehow intimated polite expectation. Appleby tumbled to it that somebody was expected to read a paper, open a discussion – something of that sort. It couldn’t, fortunately, be himself: not without any advance warning being given at all. He had, indeed, found that Australians had a certain appetite for what they called lecturettes, and did at times expect impromptu performance. But this present company was of a sort which would be more considerate. Probably it was always the host who was expected to pipe up. Yes, that would be it.

  This proved to be correct. Budgery had once more made the round of his guests, solicitous about brandy as before. He now sat down, and everybody looked at him in a convention of keen expectation. Probably he was going to produce a manuscript from a modest inside pocket, and deliver himself of it after some apologetically-toned preliminary word. Appleby experienced, once more, the sense of familiar matters in hand.

  There was, however, no manuscript. Budgery spoke fluently and coherently without note. Moreover, he took evident pleasure in the exercise. It was quite probable, Appleby thought a shade apprehensively, that he could keep it up indefinitely.

  ‘We are all very glad to have Sir John Appleby with us this evening, and only sorry that he will not be staying longer in Adelaide. He goes on to Perth tomorrow, it seems, before flying home. We all believe that there is much to be said for Adelaide – including the fact that not much is said about it in the world at large. We live in a kind of pastoral seclusion, which is a pleasant thing; indeed, it is almost Arcadian in some regards. Of course, we do keep our standards as we may. I hope Appleby has found that our policemen behave well. If he were a medical man, I don’t think his visit would altogether discourage him. And we would have liked, all of us, to show him more. Instead, we have to wish him bon voyage almost as we welcome him. Ave atque vale, in fact. May he drop down at Heathrow as fresh as paint in a few days’ time.’

  Budgery paused, and these courtesies were decorously supported by a murmur from his companions, none of whom had set eyes on their subject before this dinner party.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Appleby said. ‘I shall always remember this delightful evening.’

  Appleby believed these words to be a polite fiction – which was certainly how they would be estimated by these punctilious and agreeably clubbable persons. The event, oddly enough, was to prove them to have possessed a certain prophetic quality.

  ‘I must confess to being a little relieved,’ Budgery went on easily, ‘that I haven’t, by some stiff coincidence, chosen to ramble to you this evening on some stray fragment of criminal experience. I’d be a sad amateur at that, I need hardly say. South Australia does, of course, turn up some bizarre mysteries and even atrocities from time to time. But I hear of anything of the sort very much at second-hand – forensic medicine being no line of mine. It’s true, indeed, that what I want briefly to recall falls within a discipline almost equally peripheral, so far as I’m concerned. The story is one upon which the voice of psychiatry could well make itself heard. So it’s a pity that no psychiatrist is among our number.’

  Perhaps a somewhat self-conscious proem, Appleby told himself. And one faintly gathered that, in these Antipodean regions, any mad addiction to the speculations of Sigmund Freud and his successors would be regarded as an indecorously new-fangled thing. But at least it was somehow possible to guess that Professor Budgery wasn’t going to be entirely a bore. He possessed the art of the build-up. It was quite probable that he possessed the art of the story-teller as well. Mr Justice Somebody, an elderly and heavily-built man with habits which might conduce to drowsiness at an hour like this, was plainly going to pay attention to his host. Appleby himself could certainly do nothing less. He suspected that comment might subsequently be required of him.

  ‘The episode I shall tell you about,’ Budgery continued, ‘took place several years ago. It concerns a yacht I shall call the Jabberwock, and a yachtsman I shall call Buzfuz.’

  ‘A lawyer?’ Mr Justice Somebody asked sharply.

  ‘Ah, there you have me.’ Budgery was delighted. ‘I have chosen the sobriquet badly, my dear George. Dickens’ Serjeant Buzfuz is a false association. My man was almost certainly not a barrister – and if he had embraced any other regular profession, I never heard of it. He was a man of means – almost assuredly of substantial means – but more than that never came to me. Unless one is engaged in some advertising venture, one can’t in these days, I imagine, scour the oceans in a costly one-man contraption without being, as the young people say, in the lolly.’ Budgery paused on this, perhaps to mark his command of an up-to-the-moment demotic vocabulary. ‘But you must allow me to continue calling him Buzfuz. I have so denominated him to pupils from time to time. No names – no real names – no pack drill, eh? One rather clings to those tricks of professional reticence.’

  ‘Then Buzfuz let him be,’ Mr Justice George Somebody said judicially. ‘And now, Tim, go ahead.’

  So Professor Timothy Budgery went ahead.

  ‘I’ve spoken of one-man contraptions. The Jabberwock was that in the sense that it could perfectly well be sailed single-handed. But Colin Buzfuz – I must give him a Christian name, for a reason you will presently appreciate – commonly pottered about the globe with a companion. And that’s important. There are men, you know, who crave for absolute solitude as desperately as others may crave for a woman, or an addictive drug, or just for the bottle. The early history of this continent is full of what we call loners. And our tramps – Swagmen is our word, Appleby – often qualify as being just that. However, that’s by the way – and irrelevant, since the Buzfuzes were not Australian.’

  ‘The Buzfuzes?’ Appleby said.

  ‘There were two of them, as you must presently hear. But the immediate point is Colin, who could take fair doses of solitude, but was not temperamentally one of those fanatics for it. And he had the bad luck to have rather too much of it thrust on him in the end. Not that it wasn’t – or that much of it wasn’t – his own fault. One has to admire him, in a way. I’m bound to admit I admired him myself, even although his foolhardiness resulted in his becoming a considerable nuisance to myself and other people. He had felt a challenge, I think one may say, and been not quite certain that he had adequately faced up to it. So he tried again. One doesn’t care to speak of these things – but breeding does count. Colin Buzfuz was one of us.’

  Appleby (who had certainly never expected to hear this celebrated Conradian sentiment drop from living lips) felt it incumbent upon him to nod gravely. He also wondered whether the tempo of the narrative might with advantage be speeded up
.

  ‘Was Buzfuz driven mad?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, most decidedly – although not, fortunately, in a permanent way. And not spectacularly, either. In fact, it was some time before we tumbled to the thing. Indeed, it might have escaped us entirely – and, I suppose, with the oddest consequences – if I hadn’t myself, through pure good luck, happened to get at the truth of the matter.’

  ‘My dear Tim,’ the judge said, ‘none of us doubts that you will be constrained to exhibit yourself as having displayed uncommon perspicacity. But proceed.’

  ‘Very well, George, I’ll proceed.’ Budgery had accepted the small barb with good humour. ‘And I’ll begin with the Jabberwock, when it came sailing up St Vincent Gulf. There was nothing out of the way about it, except that it had evidently taken a bit of a battering. More exactly, it had done that, and had then in a rough and ready way been fitted out again. This was evident when people got round to inspecting it. The steering mechanism might have been repaired by a village blacksmith; a jury-mast had been stepped but was now lashed to the deck once more; the mast actually in use might have been waving in a jungle no time ago. And so on. I’m no authority on such things.

  ‘Well, this craft, it seems, had come up the Gulf in a perfectly commonplace and unnoticeable way, and had steered into the Outer Harbour. And there, under the nose of that week’s mail-boat – a whacking great Orient liner – it simply started tizzying around. Somebody got aboard, therefore, and what they found was this chap Buzfuz in the last stages of exhaustion and inanition. He simply had to be carted off to hospital.

  ‘I needn’t tell you that it didn’t make much sense. Wherever he’d come from – and his logbook was a blank for weeks – he must have made his landfall quite some time before. Had he passed through the Tasman Sea? It can be the hell of a stretch of water, they tell me, whether for vessels large or small. But after that – or even if he’d come from the South Ocean by way of the Great Australian Bight – he’d have been virtually in traffic lanes during what must have been his final desperate days. Or why hadn’t he simply put into Victor Harbour in the one event, or into Port Lincoln in the other? He’d have found a passable hotel – and more than passable doctors, had he wanted them – in either of these respectable resorts! Instead of which, you see, he was determined to honour us here in Adelaide. Did he imagine that, outside its capital cities, Australia is inhabited only by black fellows hurling boomerangs? It’s an intriguing thought, but unfortunately it won’t wash. Buzfuz proved eventually to be a highly educated chap.